A CRM for M&A has one job that a general CRM does not: it has to hold a mandate. A mandate is not an opportunity with an amount on it. It is an engagement with a client who appointed you, a fee basis, a retainer, a stage the whole process is at, and a buyer list of thirty to three hundred names each of which is at a different point. This page sets out what that difference means in practice, and what breaks when a desk models it as a sales pipeline instead.
A sales pipeline has one counterparty and a mandate has many
That is the whole difference and everything else follows from it. An opportunity in a sales CRM moves through stages towards one customer. A mandate moves through stages while thirty to three hundred buyers each move through their own. Any system with one stage field per record forces the two into one, which is why the buyer list ends up in a spreadsheet attachment.
The fee is computed, not typed
In a sales CRM the amount is a number somebody keyed in. In an M&A record it is a function of deal value, fee percentage, retainer and months, and every one of those changes during a process. A typed number is stale the week after it is typed: on the worked example here, $600,000 of success fee plus $112,500 of retainers is $712,500, and crediting the retainers makes the number at close $487,500 instead.
Conflicts are found by people reading the whole book
A small desk catches most of its conflicts and duplicate approaches because somebody else on the team saw the record and recognised a name. Locking mandates to their owners protects less than it costs, and it is the reason a per-seat price is the wrong shape for this: charging for the analyst who does the recording is charging for the thing you want more of.
What it should not try to be
Not a data room, not a valuation model, not a cap table and not fund accounting. Each of those is a real product with a real buyer, and an M&A CRM that claims all of them is either very expensive or doing most of them badly. A mandate uses those things; it is not them.
Questions people ask about crm for m&a
Can we build this on Salesforce or HubSpot?
Yes, if somebody will build the objects. If your firm has that person, use them. If it does not, that is why a purpose-built record exists.
Does it hold the data room?
No. It holds who is in the room and what stage they reached. The documents stay where counsel put them.
Is it priced per user?
No. $69 a month for the whole desk, because a record only one person can read is the problem, not the product.